the archives

A belated adieu to Baltimore (for now)

This is a small something I made with the IMovie equivalent of a single piece of Scotch tape–as a way of a coda to ANTH II, a love letter to Baltimore, and to a crazy but wonderful summer. [update: Youtube made me take it down; working on putting it back up, internally to the blog, at this time…]

Let’s try this again:

So–I left Baltimore in the middle of August 2012, after six weeks of uber-busy Parallel-Octave-filled movie-making action. In all this time, I didn’t manage to make a single movie of my own, despite co-teaching a short film class with D., producing 26 shorts in the supermegafilm (ANTHOLOGY II) and the screening in which all of those 26 things appeared. It was a busy summer. A good one, but a busy one, and, really, there wasn’t space or time for me to make a film of my own.

Poem-recording session at the Creative Alliance, following the screening of ANTHOLOGY II.

(I did direct another reading, at the Homewood House Museum, of To Die in Athens. With really complicated live video. It was excellent. There are some pictures here. There is video that I have not yet edited into a short best-of sort of thing. That was good, and it deserves its own post–but the point I’m trying to make here is that I was surrounded by filmmakers all summer, up to my ears in filmmakers, but I did not shoot a second of video.)

Rehearsal for “To Die in Athens” at the Homewood Museum. August 12, 2012.

However, after the very glorious Homewood Museum edition of TDIA was over, as my friend-from-upstate A. and I were returning the borrowed harmonium to the house of R., after we had returned said harmonium, we found ourselves cruising eastward on 28th, and I took out my point-and-shoot digital camera and shot this little thing of the street, riding in the passenger seat of her car. I knew I was going to put it together with “You’re Going To Make Me Lonesome When You Go.”

And now it’s done. I meant to have it ready to post here and on Facebook the day I left. That was a few weeks ago now. It’s been busy here, too–there’s been a festival, which I’ve been blogging from. (More on that shortly.)

There is something about hanging out with A. that makes me feel like I can do things like shoot video. In fact, the only time previous to this that I shot some was also with A., at J.’s wedding, when we stumbled onto a massive theater at Swarthmore where someone had taken all the lights off the grid. I walked among them filming them and was like “I’m going to do something with this.” I haven’t. Yet.

Situations have all been sad,
Relationships have all been bad–
Mine have been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud’s–
But there’s no way I can compare
All those scenes to this affair–
You’re going to make me lonesome when you go.

The fascination of what’s difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

– William Butler Yeats

Stay classy, ParallelOctiBaltimore. Someone is thinking about you in Poland. And just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean (a) it can’t be done (b) it stopped Yeats, or anyone else, from trying. But you know that.